Lord Beaverbrook was the original Lord Gnome, so it's a bit of luck Jodie Kidd, his great-granddaughter, looks nothing like him. She makes a very good living as a fashion model.

In Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC2), she traced her mother's line, the Hodges, and discovered that Rowland Hodge, her great-grandfather, was one of the hard-faced men who did well out of the first world war. The Hodges left Newcastle in a hurry after he and his wife were fined for hoarding a tonne of food in wartime. The newspaper report of the case, not altogether by chance, put a picture of Mr and Mrs Hodge leaving court beside another of some particularly well-fed pigs. With undiminished bounce, Mr Hodge bought himself a baronetcy from Lloyd George and became Sir Rowland. "Crafty old bugger! So that's why we talk about Beaverbrook more," said Jodie.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. In Canada she discovered that Beaverbrook's father-in-law had been embroiled in a Tragic Inferno Horror Slaying. Three Drury brothers lived together until John shot Edward, wounded Ward, set fire to the house and killed himself. As the newspaper report poetically put it: "The morning sun of the sabbath rose on a painful little scene. Nothing remained to mark that spot but a few charred and smouldering ruins and old chimneys rising out of them like huge spectres of woe."

Beaverbrook, as a newspaperman, would have appreciated both the pigs and the poetry.

Rowley parish church in Yorkshire was a soothing conclusion to these unseemly dust-ups. Jodie Kidd's Puritan ancestors left here to settle in America and are demurely remembered in a stained-glass window. They are shown as the very image of simplicity. An absolute antidote to vanity. Seeing a model stained by the heavenly blue of this window is one of genealogy's oddest conjunctions.

How Mr Hughes in The Family (Channel 4) must wish he were Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. He could then leave the management of his wilful daughters to Mrs Hughes. Behind the solid door of his sanctum, the sounds of shrieks and passionate sobbing would be mercifully muffled and almost musical. The Hughes had three daughters before striking quiet with young Tom. Jess has moved out and is living in unsanctified bliss. Charlotte is bunking off school and in floods of tears. Emily is a whirling dervish who, last night, applied for a job selling shots in a nightclub. Shots of what was not specified.

Finding a single man in possession of a good fortune to take them on will not be easy. Mr Hughes does all the cooking, from ambitious roast duck to homemade apple pie as, apparently, none of the women can cook. We'll let that burst on the husbands after the honeymoon.

Lost in Austen (ITV1), a time-travelling comedy, was bundled up into a suitcase last night with bits hanging out. Einstein could probably get the hang of it. Jane Bennet's marriage to Mr Collins was annulled and she decamped with Mr Bingley to the Americas, while Mr Darcy declared his love for Amanda despite her being a despoiled maid. "Jane Austen," as Amanda, an interloper from the present day, said, "would be spinning in her grave like a cat in a tumble drier."

The best bit was Darcy and Amanda bursting into 21st-century Hammersmith, all seething shoppers, double deckers and pneumatic drills - "this infernal place" as Darcy put it. It was notable that his britches and her bonnet were utterly ignored. Only one man with a ponytail turned to take a second glance, not at Amanda but Darcy.

Nye Bevan had a slight stammer which, if anything, seemed to intensify his speech like a river in spate flinging rocks aside. It seemed altogether appropriate that halfway through Greg Dyke On Aneurin Bevan (BBC4) my DVD stammered to a stop.

I heard Bevan speak before the Labour landslide of 1945 and before Greg Dyke was born. He was supporting the young Barbara Castle, who sat behind him, her hair like a candle flame. His voice was high, sometimes rising to a squeak on a particularly passionate point. I cannot tell you now, and probably could not then have told then, what he said, but the effect was hypnotic. Lifted a foot or so from the floor, I floated home and in that elevated state voted precisely as he told me to. It's a dangerous power, great oratory. A friend told me that, on one occasion, "Nye sicked the crowd on to the press". The press ran.

Perhaps it's as well there's not much around any more. The last of the demagogues, George Galloway, told Griff Rhys Jones this week how he prepared to address the US Senate. He got up very early and sat for four hours thinking how to do it and settled, being a former boxer, on a jab, jab, jab technique. It seemed, he said purring, to work. It did.